Indeed I did; this is slightly spruced up from the original adventure I put people through. My players handled it just fine, and have no particular beef with such challenges.

Following your comment to Dossta above, you're absolutely right: the surviving baby proved the toughest challenge of all. The character in question proclaimed his intent to keep the baby, adopted him when they got back to civilization ... and then promptly checked out, preferring to keep his city focus on his social climbing and his aristocratic mistress. Happily, the party leader has a strong maternal instinct and cared for the boy, and took him with her when she became pregnant herself and relocated to the elven empire. It broke her heart to hear the now-toddler plaintively ask where his papa was and why he never wrote ("Is it because I'm bad, Auntie 'Laina?"), and she adopted him herself.

The child is now nearly six, and a good, sweet lad, but heck ... he's a creation of the freaking God of Pain, he sees and speaks to disembodied spirits, and the grownups are worried as all get out as to what he might become when he grows up. Go to Comment

Interesting setup. Forcing the players to stand alone like this could provide for some good gameplay, but I would still probably tweak it a bit to give my players the option of seeking more help. Perhaps the barrier could allow a second player (or third) through if the subject of the test requested it? There should be a significant penalty or other alteration to the test to make the first player hesitate to do this, however. I would probably also remove the barrier against sound entirely, so that the rest of the party can at least stand by and shout advice, thus remaining more involved.

A few other small nitpicks: challenges one and two (judging the baby case and dealing with the live baby) are significantly easier than the rest of them, and might cause a party to cry foul when faced with the later challenges. Also, you forgot to include the answers to the three riddles.

Overall, I like this. The puzzles are interesting and practical and I think there is enough description to carry it through.

I probably wouldn't use it myself. While I see the challenge in making a single player face a barrow alone (and I would applaud a GM who could pull it off), I don't like the idea of making the rest of the players wait around. The few times I've ever done something like this, I've lost control of the group (players would lose interest, get up and wander around, and have trouble getting back into play.) Maybe that says more about my limitations as a GM, but I have more success when I keep as many players involved as possible. Plus, I like seeing how a group responds to a challenge. That kind of group energy is the reason I play so few video games (and I'm too set in my ways to try those new-fangled MMORPGS.)

While I could be wrong, I think Echo's point is that this feels a little contrived. Your point about the classic dungeon being far more unrealistic and contrived is a good one that I fully agree with, which is why I don't run them.

I do prefer subs with some extra prose. Even though I would never read stuff like that off to the players, I find that that extra bit of flavor helps bring the ideas to life for me. I understand that that is a personal preference, so I don't knock off points for subs that don't do it. You provided enough detail to make it understandable and I commend you for that.

And bonus points for using barrow mounds. I've always been fascinated by them.

I like the idea of them. I imagine they would be on the top of castles or keeps of the rulers when not in use on the battlefield. I would assume that their magic continues no matter where they are. Neat. Go to Comment

Alignment:
Idly imagining if some wondrous event may take place if all the flags were brought within a mile of each other or put into some other kind of alignment. I felt the need to believe that these were obviously made to be used together for some larger purpose. Perhaps the configuration would do something dramatic but I have no idea what or how many possible alignments there are causing some number of different affects. My mind wants to make ideas but I can't come up with any. Go to Comment

Huh. That's not a half-bad notion, and one I never thought of. Come to that, never mind all of them ... what happens if you put ANY of them in close proximity? Should Avanar and Vallia go to open war again, that might put as many as four Standards on the same battlefield (Avanar's third Standard is a thousand miles from the Vallian border, and the other two known Standards are several hundreds of miles apart as well.)

Beyond that, the Vallian-Avanari border's been the world's most contested for centuries now, and a lot of the same battles are fought over the same plains they've been fought over for generations. Who's to say that the burial mounds over there don't contain a forgotten Standard, which will have that synergistic effect on/with the others? Go to Comment

This follows Steve Darlington’s excellent format for designing adventures: take an evocative song you like and use it as your inspiration. For the ones I’m posting here, I use Moody Blues’ songs; this one is Ride My See-Saw. The adventure was written for my Firefly campaign, but it works in any SF campaign. Unlike a number other of these plots, it’s not as adaptable to other milieus, but were I to do so, I’d make it an invasion plot: the orcs/Apaches/NVA are coming with an unstoppable force the party cannot hope to defeat or thwart, and they have to manage the evacuation. Go to Comment

Which might backfire, unless you can launch a ship in seconds. Presuming you have your crew all inside and the ship buttoned up ... well, think a mob of five hundred people on the pad, given about ninety seconds, could make the Space Shuttle unable to launch? I could easily see it happening here. Go to Comment

It really is. Steve designed it for doing Buffy games, where sessions are deliberately episodic, and it's surprisingly useful for the format. Absolutely give it a try: just pick song titles from your favorite band and go for it. Go to Comment